


i found myself an omen

by Illusively (Hermia)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-30
Updated: 2013-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-13 09:29:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/822745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hermia/pseuds/Illusively
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she was created in his image, by his hands, on his time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i found myself an omen

Kate dies without the truth.

–

She's seventeen and lounging on a beach towel in the backyard when she hears squealing breaks. Car doors slam as her heart rate speeds up, and her dad's voice rises above the still running engine. She can't decipher any words. It's his uncharacteristic panic that sinks in through her pores, heating up her sun-warmed skin to a burn as she scrambles to her feet, leaving her iPod mini stranded in the grass.

Her hands snag on the sliding patio door, the view past the glass keeping her from latching on and sliding it open. 

Chris follows their dad into the kitchen. His shoes leave bloody footprints as he tracks through the thick, black puddles left behind by their mom. Two hands clutch onto her thin neck, and they squeeze so hard, Kate can feel them around her own.

When Chris catches her eyes, Kate slams her palm flat against the glass once, then twice, then three, four, five times in quick succession, all but bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Let me in!” she shouts, as loud and as clearly as she can manage. Her voice scrapes at the back of her throat, leaving her already hoarse. She bangs on the door again, harder, wordlessly threatening to tear it down.

But he's cradling the back of their mom's head as their dad lays her down on the breakfast table with its skinny legs, soaked in sunlight. The front of his shirt sags, saturated. The palms of his hands are covered, and his thumbs leave streaks of bright red over her pale cheeks.

“Shit,” Kate breathes out. The curse trembles on her lips, and she lingers at the door for another moment before launching into action. She jumps down the three stairs leading into the backyard and tears around the side of the house, fingers fumbling over the gate's lock but eventually succeeding. Throwing the door open, she cuts through the front yard, honey blonde hair and the strings tying her bikini bottoms to her hips whipping behind her.

The kitchen smells like iron, gunpowder, and wolfsbane.

Kate can hear her mother sputtering with every breath. She struggles to blot out the noise, to ignore what sounds like Death rattling chains at everyone standing around the table. “What happened?” she asks, hating herself for the whine embedded in her voice and the tears that sting at her eyes and the way she stands a couple of feet behind Chris. 

When no one answers her, she repeats herself. Louder. Her roughened scream fills up the room down to the dusty corners, fists curled so tight they ache. “ _What happened_!?”

“Wolves,” Chris tells her as she catches her dad's eyes.

They're dry. Drier than hers. Drier than his wife's skin beneath his callused hands.

She knows what they are. Summer days are spent in the sun; summer nights are spent out in the woods with her crossbow (and, more recently, with her hunting rifle). She knows that werewolves are inherently dangerous. She knows they'll rip someone apart if they have to. Or want to. She knows that there's a Code, one her brother adheres to to the letter. She knows that the other hunting families consider her dad a rebel.

She doesn't know how to stop someone from bleeding out. She doesn't know how to comfort a dying woman.

She doesn't know how to breathe.

All she knows is that she can't do this again.

–

When Kate finds out about werewolves, she's thirteen.

It's the first time she's ever seen a dead body.

She has a panic attack in their basement.

–

Taking a deep breath and ignoring the burning in her lungs, Kate pushes past her brother and reaches for her mother's hand. The skin is sticky and dark with blood, like everything else.

“Mom?” she asks, her voice even and the only thing breaking the silence save for each pathetic breath that brings her mother closer to Death and his chains rattling in her chest cavity. Their eyes meet, blue-green-gray eyes reflecting each others'. One set is thrown open, wide and scared, but the other set is forcibly calm, like the sun pulled in a deep breath and stole the wind from the waves. “Mom, I'm here.”

She squeezes her mothers hand. Her stomach turns as the sound of a soft squelch.

There's a gurgle that could mean anything. I love you. I'm proud of you. Let go of my hand.

Kate holds on. She holds on as her dad offers her mother a clean death. She holds on as Chris protests – loudly – on the edge of tears himself. She holds on as the air settles around them, dense as smoke, and they watch blood trickle from the gaping tear at the bottom of her throat, closer to her shoulder than her carotid artery. The wound is fresh. She doesn't have much time left.

From the way they wait, she knows her mother was bitten by a beta. She wouldn't have made it all the way back home otherwise. There would be a splatter of blood in the dirt, chunks of her mother's brain and bits of her skull weighing down delicate blades of grass. 

Her mother dies right there on the table in the breakfast nook, her neck torn open and her hand pressed between one of Kate's. Chris turns and leaves immediately, keenly aware of his need for privacy, but her dad stays rooted into the ground. When she looks at him, an expectant expression reflects back at her, curious and simmering beneath a thinly veiled look of pure hatred.

“I know this pack,” he tells her, fists pressed into the table. He clarifies with a hard, “ _knew_ ,” and Kate feels her heart dip down into her stomach. “They've got family. Just as bad. It's in the blood.”

Sliding her hand away from her mother's, she smeared the blood over her thigh in a desperate attempt to get it off of her fingers. So they were attacked by purebloods in the middle of the day. It _was_ close to the full moon. Hours away, even.

Still, she doesn't ask for a name. He gives it to her anyway.

“Hale.” The name is a spray of saliva and a low growl. Kate's grief entrenches her. There's a panic clawing up her spine, wrapping around her lungs, threatening to break her in two again. She knows of the Hales. Her dad mentioned them before once or twice, a family of four and an offshoot of the main pack. There was a father, a mother, and two children – one seventeen, another ten. Now they're dead.

No. They hadn't been _murdered,_ Kate reminds herself. They deserved it. They killed her mother.

Turning towards her dad, he looks at her and manages a small smile, comforting in his own way. Chris didn't need him. She did. She was too young to deal with this on her own.

(He made sure of that.)

“We'll avenge her, sweetheart. We'll do the right thing.”

–

Kate spends two years training with her dad's sword.

She gets stronger and stronger.

When she cuts her first werewolf in half, she hears her mother's breath rattling in her ears.

–

Kate dies without the truth.

She dies a soldier, not a leader. 

She dies her father's pawn.

Her neck cracks and her throat bleeds into the dried out floorboards of the Hale house, and she dies never having second guessed the man who put steel in her spine. She never asked Chris about their mother's death.

She never wondered why a pack of born werewolves would attack three hunters in broad daylight. She never told her father no; she followed his orders to perfection.

She died thinking she was doing the right thing.


End file.
